Dragon Age Origins: first PC patch

EDIT — I hate to have to add this hours after touting the patch, but be careful. Installing it is preventing people from running the game. This may be related to VS runtime stuff, but either way it’s ridiculously unprofessional and, in my now jaundiced view, rather epic FAIL from Bioware. Not good, guys, really. This forum thread has more info.

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Saturday 7th Edit: BioWare have updated their social site to make the patch actually findable by people, as Spinks reports. Hopefully the next thing will be a patch that doesn’t require a workaround for people running 64-bit OSs.

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That only took 3 days! Actually, the pessimist in me was expecting to download a patch the second I’d installed the game. Maybe I play too many MMOs?

fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable Character Creator

fixed import for preset face settings from the downloadable Character Creator

made Easy difficulty easier

slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty

fixed video issues when running on a very wide screen display, including ATI Eyefinity displays

Steam has already released it for those users.

I noticed with interest that among other things it fixes my “fugly imported characters” issue. Yay! As for making Easy mode easier, all I can say is /boggle. I played both intros on easy mode, and if I could manage it then anyone else can. Then again, I haven’t played any of the dwarven intros and I gather they’re a little more hardcore, as is only fitting for dorfs. Even so… easier easy mode seems like easymode overkill.

Post 1995 rule of gaming number 1: Always make the game so easy that a 5 year old, or semi-intelligent monkey can one shot the last boss on easy mode. At least the rest of us still have the option to jack up the difficulty so high, only this guy can finish the game.

Good to see the Bioware is on top of things and doing their best to fix the bugs. On a personal note, many of the problems I experienced on the PS3 version seem to be confined to the human warrior starting zone. Once I started venturing out into the world, many of the bugs became less frequent. I’m still having sound issues from time to time, but the frame rate has gotten exponentially better.